Thursday, December 26, 2013

When the Copper Canyon Press published Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hồ Xuân Hương, the New York Times discussed it in its Technology section. 'A nearly extinct ideographic script known as Nôm, similar to Chinese
but representing Vietnamese, was painstakingly put into a computer
program, and thus did the works of Hồ arrive in Western bookstores.
Considered one of Vietnam's greatest poets, Hồ was born in the late
1700's and wrote with unusual irreverence and shockingly erotic
undertones for her time. Hồ's work really ''jumped from woodcut to
digitization, skipping the whole Gutenberg process,'' said John Balaban, the North Carolina poet who translated her folk poems and
helped oversee their presentation in the strikingly designed book. Each
poem is presented in three versions, across facing pages: in the
original Nôm, in modern romanized Vietnamese, and in English.' One of these is shown above; another translation is reprinted in full at the Smith College Poetry Center site, so hopefully it is OK to include it here:

Three-Mountain Pass

A cliff face. Another. And still a third.
Who was so skilled to carve this craggy scene:

A twisting pine bough plunges in the wind,
showering a willow’s leaves with glistening drops.

Gentlemen, lords, who could refuse, though weary
and shaky in his knees, to mount once more?

At first site this is a simple landscape poem but as the New York Times notes, Hồ's poems tend to have 'shockingly erotic undertones'. This is partly facilitated by the tonal nature of Vietnamese - words can take on second meanings depending merely on the pitch of each syllable. In John Balaban's notes to accompany 'Three-Mountain Pass', he says that Maurice Durand, a French-Vietnamese scholar whose edition of Hồ's poems remained incomplete at his death in 1966, thought that the poem probably describes the Đèo Tam Điệp mountains, 'but, he adds innocently, "l'on n'a pas de grotte avec une grande ouverture." While an actual landscape may have suggested this poem ... the particular contours, the active pine and willow constitute a sexual landscape as well. Pines traditionally stand for men; willows for women.' 'Three-Mountain Pass' is about the compulsion to explore both the landscape and the body - perhaps, it suggests, the differences are no more than a matter of tone.

Monday, December 23, 2013

It could be said that we owe those vivid etchings currently on display in the Dulwich Picture Gallery's exhibition Whistler and The Thamesto the United States Coast Survey, who employed the young artist as a draftsman on $1.50 a day for two months in the winter of 1854-5. It was there that he made his first etching under the eye of a 'kindly, genial Irishman' Mr McCoy, as John Ross Key another young artist employed by the Survey recalled years later. Whistler at that time 'was a slender young man of medium height, with dark, curly hair and a small mustache. A Scotch cap was set well forward over his eyes, and he wore a shawl of dark-blue and green plaid thrown over his shoulders, as was the fashion of the day. He was assigned to a room on the third floor, adjoining the one where I was employed as a draftsman, and we soon became good friends.
It was reported about the office that Whistler had been at West Point, and that his disinclination to obey rules, chief of which had been his lack of promptness, had led to his retirement.' Whistler did not readily appreciate the drier aspects of his new work and so 'when, after many trials, it was plain that he would not take to
map-drawing, it was suggested that he might etch the little views of
entrances to harbors that were then engraved upon the lower part of
coast-maps' (Recollections of Whistler, Century Magazine, April 1908).

Key describes Whistler's first experiment in etching. 'I watched him with unabated interest from the moment he began his work until he completed it, which took a day or two. At intervals, while doing the topographical view, he paused to sketch on
the upper part of the plate, the vignette of "Mrs. Partington" and
"Ike," a soldier's head, a suggestion of a portrait of himself as a
Spanish hidalgo, and other bits, which are the charm of the work.' These characters, contrasting oddly with the precise landscape below them, were drawn from a humorous story by Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber, the Life and Sayings of Mrs Partington (1854). 'I have heard it stated that he lost his position
because of the drawings on this plate, but there is no foundation for
this report. As I have explained, this plate was merely an experiment,
intended as such.' Key later found this plate and kept it, intending to return it to Whistler when he was in London, but they never managed to meet again. The rocky coastline with its doodled characters can be seen in engravings made from this plate; the other sketch surviving from Whistler's time with the survey, showing Anacapa Island, is reproduced above.

Key's recollections of Whistler are disappointingly short of good anecdotes. 'He had no bad habits, and did not
smoke. His manners were quiet and sedate ... and he was not interested in young ladies.' His evident facility in portraying coastal features was not motivated by an enthusiasm to explore and understand the surrounding landscape. It is easy to imagine here the future painter of Nocturnes, exercises in atmosphere and colour inspired more by the Japanese prints in Whistler's room than the precise topography of the river outside. Key remembered that 'one of the draftsmen, an old Englishman, was then in the habit of taking long walks to sketch the woods and to fish in the streams near the city. I often went with him, and did my best to persuade Whistler to join us, but he could not be induced to make the exertion. He was the most indolent young man I have ever known.'

These are the opening lines of H.D.'s poem 'Hermes of the Ways', which was published in Ezra Pound's anthology Des Imagistes almost a hundred years ago. It was one of the poems Pound had been shown in 1912 by the 'ardent young Hellenists', H.D. and Richard Aldington and which he sent in to Harriet Monroe's Poetry. It was, he thought, "objective - no slither - direct - no excess of adjectives. etc. No metaphors that won't permit examination. - It's straight talk - straight as the Greek!" In The Pound Era Hugh Kenner describes the first three lines of this poem: 'perception slides over perception, each line the natural unit of the process ... one line of statement, its narrative implication (feet crushing salty dried shore) compressed to the uttermost; one line of microscopic attention, discerning the grains; one line of arresting comparison, casual and evaluative (like wine, this shore is welcome; like sand, the benison is equivocal).'

Hermes, Orator - Roman copy from the late 1st century CE-early 2nd century CE

after a Greek original of the 5th century BC

In H.D.'s poem a statue of Hermes - the god of travellers, transitions and boundaries - stands 'where sea-grass tangles with / shore-grass.' Nearby there is an orchard with twisted trees and small hard apples ripened late by 'a desperate sun / that struggles through sea-mist.' The statue 'fronts the great dunes' where the wind rushes through coarse grass, crusted in salt. A small white stream flows underground from a poplar-shaded hill and emerges on the sands. 'Hermes of the Ways' (as you can see at the Modernist Journals Project site) was published in the January 1913 edition of Poetry under the title 'Verses,
Translations and Reflections from 'The Anthology''. This is a reference
to The Greek Anthology which has a group of epigrams by Anyte, including the one that H.D. adapted and expanded for her poem. This prose translation of Anyte's poem is by Richard Aldington and was first published in 1915:

HERMES OF THE WAYS

I, Hermes, stand here at the cross-roads by the wind-beaten orchard, near the hoary-grey coast;

And I keep a resting-place for weary men. And the cool stainless spring gushes out.

Anyte of Tegea lived in Arcadia in the early third century BCE. She seems to have been, as it says in my Penguin edition of The Greek Anthology, 'the first poet to write epitaphs on animals, and to introduce bucolic themes into epigram.' Her epigram 'Hermes of the Ways' interests me both as a condensed landscape poem (orchard, coast and spring) and as the evocation of a landscape sculpture. Another (given in Aldington's translation below) provides a contrasting image of a statue by the sea. In poems like this, Marylin B. Skinner has suggested that Anyte offers an 'introspective'
approach to ekphrasis, in contrast to male poets' detached way of reporting a
visual experience (see 'Ladies' Day at the Art Institute: Theocritus, Herodas and the Gendered Gaze'). 'Aphrodite's benevolent mood
is mirrored in the translucent expanse of water viewed from her headland and
transmuted into concern for the mariners she beholds from afar. In the third
line, there is an abrupt switch in perspective to the reverent tremor of the
water as it, in turn, observes the goddess' glistening statue.'

ENGRAVED ON A STATUE OF APHRODITE

This is the land of Kypris, since it pleases her to gaze for ever from land over the glittering sea.So that she may bear the sailors safe to land; and the sea quivers, looking upon her shining image.

The Cyprus Mail reported earlier this year on plans to build a four-metre tall bronze statue of Aphrodite on a rock in the sea. Ten years ago a more controversial proposal for a hundred-foot statue based on Botticelli's Venus was stopped. 'Artists and environmentalists branded published photographs as ‘ugly’,
and reminiscent of Hollywood and Las Vegas kitsch. One artist said it
looked like a cake. The Chamber of Fine Arts (EKATE) said the idea of a Statue of Liberty
sized goddess of love was “base, barbaric, morbid, bizarre, provocative,
flashy, grotesque, monstrous, out of proportion, over the top, tacky,
cheap, pointless and offensive”'. Planning for the new project is in its early stages so it is not yet clear whether this bronze Aphrodite will one day be gazing over the glittering sea. There are no such statues of gods in the other two 'landscape poems' of Anyte that survive in The Greek Anthology:
just trees and spring waters and a cool breeze. I think Ezra Pound's advice to poets in 'A Few Don'ts By an
Imagiste', written for the March 1913 edition of Poetry, should be heeded by all those commissioning public artworks: 'Use either no ornament or good ornament'.

TO A GIRL

Sit beneath the beautiful leaves of this laurel, and draw the sweet water from the fresh spring:You are breathless from the heat; rest your dear limbs and let the breath of Zephyros touch them.

FOR A FOUNTAIN

O wanderer, rest your tired limbs under this elm; the breeze murmurs in the light-green branches.
Drink a cool draught from the spring. This resting place is dear to wayfarers in the hot summer.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Among the Convolutes of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin MacLoughlin),one section is devoted to 'Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, Decline of Paris.' There, Benjamin observes that 'few things in the history of humanity are as well known to us as the history of Paris':

'Many of the main thoroughfares have their own special literature, and we possess written accounts of thousands of the most inconspicuous houses. In a beautiful turn of phrase, Hugo von Hofmannsthal called [this city] 'a landscape built of pure life:' And at work in the attraction it exercises on people is the kind of beauty that is proper to great landscapes - more precisely, to volcanic landscapes. Paris is a counterpart in the social order to what Vesuvius is in the geographic order: a menacing, hazardous massif, an ever-active hotbed of revolution. But just as the slopes of Vesuvius, thanks to the layers of lava that cover them, have been transformed into paradisal orchards, so the lava of revolutions provides uniquely fertile ground for the blossoming of art, festivity, fashion.'

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

This is my annual post on landscape music - the earlier ones (with apologies for a few dead links now) are here: 2010, 2011, 2012. I discussed a couple of excellent records earlier in the year so won't linger over thesehere: My Garden State by Glenn Jones and In St Cuthbert's Time by Chris Watson (I also wrote about Hiroki Sasajima's work but neglected to mention Circle Wind, sounds recorded at night around Tokyo and other urban locations). Many of the themes I observed in 2012 were present this year too: encounters with mountains, rivers and islands; the search for politically charged sites and landscapes haunted by history; continuing attempts to expand field recording beyond simple notions of soundscape; music composed in studios or outdoors as an offshoot of wider artistic endeavours and then sold in a range of collectible formats. Particularly noticeable this year, I think, has been the way some musicians and sound artists have engaged in different forms of field work, walking the landscape and documenting their findings in film and text as well as recorded sound. The finished compositions are therefore the product of a period of research: digging in archives and libraries, investigations of particular
sites or topographical features, close observation of natural phenomena and acoustic experimentation.

Typical of this trend is an album by The Memory Band, on whose website you can read a series of Stephen Cracknell's Field Reports. They were made whilst exploring the South Country and composing On the Chalk (Our Navigation of the Line of the Downs). Cracknell explains that his steps were guided by old topographical writings - Belloc, Massingham, R. Hippisley Cox’s Green Roads Of England, Ancient Trackways Of Wessex by H.W. Timperley & Edith Brill. On the day the record was complete he set off again on The Harrow Way, a semi-legendary ancient path: 'I walked the best part of sixty miles in those three days ending at Stonehenge, blistered and hobbled but elated.' There is a Caught by the River review of the album byRob St. John in which he describes On the Chalk as a place 'where the pastoral meets the produced, where machines (whether cars,
planes or drum machines) plough patterned furrows through rich and
partially-obscured landscapes. As Cracknell puts it in the sleeve
notes: ‘It is an album about change, the power of human will and our relationship with the landscape as we pass through it’.'

Place and its relationship to history have been the subject of another ongoing investigation by lo-fi duo Way Through. Last year I mentioned here seeing them play at Cafe Oto, supporting James Brooks / Land Observations, whose own landscape project was dedicated to Roman Roads (and who contributed this year to Simon Fisher Turner's new soundtrack for The Epic of Everest). Way Through's latest album, Clapper is Still, includes ‘Dedham Vale’ and 'Eyam', songs about two very different villages preserved as heritage sites, 'Sipson', on a site that is, in contrast, under threat from the expansion
of Heathrow Airport, and ‘Imber and Tyneham’, referring to places that were cleared of their inhabitents during World War Two
(the latter is Patrick Wright's 'Village that Died for England'). Rob
St. John has reviewed this one as well for Caught by the River: 'lyrics cribbed from local history leaflets, information boards and bus
stop graffiti become spoken and sung invocations of the sublime, the
suburban and the specific. Chiming, often-dissonant guitar gusts off
into post-punk angles: plotting new cartographical soundings over old
ground.'

Rob St. John himself has been exploring Edinburgh's waterways, documenting his researches as a 7" single with accompanying essays and prints. This was part of the Year of Natural Scotland, for which numerous artists seem to have been making work in 2013, navigating a system of funding streams as complex as the lochs, drains, springs and sewers of the city. Chris Dooks was another sound artist involved in this, with a film, Tiny Geographies and accompanying soundtrack; he has also recently completed Ciga{r}les, a set oftreated field recordings made partly for therapeutic reasons (I think the looped voices on the former and combination of bagpipes and cicadas on the latter may not appeal to everyone). Although the Natural Scotland projects sound interesting, they make you wonder how far records themselves can be appreciated out of context. To stand on its own, a set of sound recordings need to be reorientated: Geoff Mullen's Filtered Water for example, is two long pieces derived from a 'multi-channel sound installation in the backwoods of
Hudson Valley', converted into a mono recording. Similarly, Jem Finer and Andrew Kötting's Visionary Seascapes is more than simply the soundtrack to the film they made last year with Iain Sinclair, Swandown.

Pilgrim Chants & Pastoral Trails by Sharron Kraus is another album dedicated to a specific landscape. One sunny day, she writes, whilst driving through the Welsh countryside, "I had the overwhelming sense that there was music contained in the landscape, waiting to be discovered. I decided to move to Mid-Wales, to a quiet place just north of that valley and try to tap into that music and draw it out." The resulting compositions couldn't be less like Way Through; Joseph Stannard in The Wire praised their 'wild magic and windswept beauty.' Kraus cites Richard Skelton as an influence, and this year he has been re-visiting music inspired by the landscape of Ulpha, in south-west Cumbria. These kind of recordings, like field notes or diaries, can be returned to and developed in new ways. Heand Autumn Richardson describe the composition of Succession in almost scientific terms: 'the process of recovering
these fragments and threading them into song is analogous to the work of
palynologists, reconstructing images of past landscape ecologies from
the layers of sediment. It is a kind of archaeology, a work of
archivism.'

Swiss sound artist Marcus Maeder has been leading 'trees',
a research project conducted by the Institute for Computer Music and
Sound Technology (ICST) in collaboration with the Swiss Federal
Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL). Their aim is
to 'combine field recordings of meteorological phenomena, recordings of
acoustic emissions in trees and acoustic representations (sonifications)
of ecophysiological data in one single auditory experience and make
their correlation acoustically and aesthetically experienceable and
explorable.' Some of this sounds like the old dream of listening to the
landscape directly, an idea I have often referred to here (see for
example my post from earlier this year, Shoreless River). Maeder's own CD, topographie sinusoïdale, constructs music as if it were a landscape: 'arranged in space, defining
upper and lower boundaries of spatial objects, cliffs, edges, slow
passages from one scene to another, at times focusing on details of a
larger group of objects.' Reviewing it recently in The Wire,
Richard Pennell found it 'a very pretty, gently fluid piece of music,
but a little too anodyne, an overlong watercolour wash.'

The same could not be said for Emptyset - Paul Purgas and James Ginzburg
- who specialise in subjecting resonant sites to noise at high volumes and
frequencies and recording the results. At the start of the year they
had an installation at Tate Britain as part of the Performing Architecture series. Here's what Boomkat had to say about their latest release, Material: 'In what has become the dominant theme of Emptyset's work, the cavernous architecture of the different settings - Trawsfynydd
Nuclear Power Station in Snowdonia, Ambika P3 in London, and Chislehurst
Mine in Kent - becomes a component of the music itself, the duo's
bowel-shaking low frequencies responding to every nook, curve and
surface texture of these man-made caves. When you think of the uses
these spaces have historically been put to (chalk and flint mining,
Magnox nuclear reaction, concrete testing), it's hard to think of
Material as anything but industrial music in its purest, or at least
most literal, form.'

Touch always feature in my annual surveys, and a new BJ Nilson
album coming out shortly sounds interesting - 'a somewhat surreal audio
rendition of the sounds of The City of London.' Earlier in the year they released Diluvial, a collaboration between Wire's Bruce Gilbert and Beaconsfield ArtWorks on the theme of rising sea levels. Another album of note was Burkhard Stangl's Unfinished. For William Turner, painter, inspired by the artist's extraordinary late work (Tate Britain has an exhibition planned for next year, Late Turner: Painting Set Free, so I expect to see this CD on sale in their shop). Then there was Stromboli, a collection of field recordings by Geir Jenssen, better known as Biosphere for his 'arctic techno' - most recently N-Plants
(2011), an album inspired by the Japanese nuclear industry and recorded
a month before the Fukashima disaster. Jenssen has also been
active in mountaineering and in 2001 climbed the Himalayan peak Cho
Oyu. The sounds he assembled on that expedition were released a few
years later as Cho Oyu 8201m – Field Recordings from Tibet. The
new album for Touch consists of a Stromboli soundscape on the first
side and a 'dub version' (subtly different) on the other.

Another volcanic area, Lyttelton, on the South Island of New Zealand, has been explored by Jo Burzynska, who records as Stanier Black-Five. For her album Avast! 'sounds were captured at sites around the natural amphitheatre of this extinct caldera: from abandoned wartime bunkers on the top of the crater rim to the port and its cacophony of cargo ships, tugs and workshops.' This area was also the epicentre of the earthquake that hit Christchurch in 2011. Burzynska 'grabbed a recording device as she ran from her home, leaving it running on her doorstep capturing the aftershocks that ricocheted though her house and the disaster unfolding on the street outside.' These sounds were then used in the album Body Waves, a collaboration with Malcolm Riddoch (whose exotic pseudonym is Zeug Gezeugt). Reading about some of these sound artists, I sometimes end up thinking I'm in the wrong line of work... Jo Burzynska manages to combine field recording with being a wine writer and this summer created a 'multi-sensory sound and wine installation' for an event called Oenosthesia in Auckland.

It is impossible here to cover all the significant field recordings released in 2013 - hopefully The Field Reporter will put together a survey like they did last year. However, I'd like to mention two of the organisers of In the Field, the symposium I attended in February, who have releases out this year: Cathy Lane, who has brought together interviews, archive recordings and natural sounds in The Hebrides Suite (see 'On the Machair', above) and Ian Rawes, who has put together together a record of some highlights from his London Sound Survey. Last year Ian's British Library colleague Cheryl Tipp gave me some suggestions for notable releases to mention here. This year she has drawn my attention to Luis Antero's project O Rio / the River. The
first part is a confluence of water sounds recorded along the Alvoco
river in Portugal. The newly issued second instalment documents the
memories of an old river-keeper and three villagers who talk about the
disused watermills. The Impulsive Habitat label that put out Antero's
recordings (run by David Velez, who set up The Field Reporter) has dealt in a
diverse range of soundscapes this year: the Madagascan rainforest, the Parque Nacional Natural Los Nevados in Columbia, the Crack of Humahuaca in Argentina, the road between Takasaki and Tokyo, the platforms of Union Station in Kansas City, and the 'grimy laneways' of inner Sydney Camperdown.

Back in 2010 I devoted a post here to the music of John Luther Adams, including Inuksuit,
a composition designed to be played and heard out in the landscape.
Cantaloupe, the label run by Bang on a Can, have now put this out on CD
for the first time: a recording made in the forest surrounding
Guilford Sound in Guilford, Vermont. Back in July, Ivan Hewitt interviewed Adams and it is worth reading his account of experiencing Inuksuit among the beech trees at the University of Richmond.Having
reached a crescendo the music subsided, the musicians went their
separate ways and the audience 'ambled out into the trees and
along the lake, pausing to listen to a vibraphone player here, a
flautist
there. Waves of sound rose, changed colour very slowly, and passed
through
the trees. Eventually they dispersed, but one couldn’t be sure for
some time
that the music was finally over.'

There are still composers writing more traditional
programmatic music inspired by nature: Jennifer Higdon for example, whose An Exaltation of Larks and Sky Quartet
appeared this year (she can be heard on the Q2 music Soundcloud site introducing her music, including
other landscape related compositions like 'City Scape', 'Summer
Shimmers', 'Autumn Reflexions' and 'Dooryard Bloom', a setting of Walt Whitman). There is landscape too in the poetry of Ted Kooser, whose words were put to music this year by Dawn Upshaw and Maria Schneider for their song cycle Winter Morning Walks. Personally I would rather listen to Hirta Songs, a collaboration between Alasdair Roberts and Robin Robertson (whose poetry and compelling voice I have referred to here before). Robertson has written self-deprecatingly in The Guardianthat the poem he wrote after visiting the island of St Kilda was 'really just
a list of place names' - 'although it gave some sense of the scale of
the place, and allowed for
the sea-rhythms, the poem had lots of topography, but no real
narrative.' So he got together with Roberts to work up a set of folk
songs and tell the island's stories, but that original poem, 'Leaving St
Kilda', remains in the middle of the album, read to the accompaniment of
Corrina Hewat's gentle harp.

Musical collaboration increasingly occurs remotely over the internet: one example from 2013 was Temperament as Waveform by field recordists Lee Patterson and Vanessa Rossetto. It was interesting therefore to read that Taylor Deupree and Australian Cameron Webb (Seaworthy) deliberately went to great lengths to meet and walk together the snow before composing Wood, Winter, Hollow. Deupree prefers 'the human interaction and local
landscapes over the soulless exchange of sound files.' So 'the pair struck out in a New York February
to a 4,000 acre nature preserve near Deupree’s studio called Ward Pound
Ridge, a park rich in history that supports a diverse range of plant
and animal life. While the cold of winter kept most of the animals quiet
the landscape nonetheless teemed with sounds.' They recorded raindrops on stone, wind in the beech trees and a creak slowly flowing through ice. Later, in the warmth of the studio, these were combined with bells, sticks, melodica, analog synthesiser and the gentle sound of Seaworthy's guitar. The result (see below) is quite different from 'Rusted Oak', Deupree's ambient soundscape that I featured in my 2010 Landscape Music round-up.

Field of Reeds, These New Puritans' follow-up to Hidden (NME's album of the year for 2010) has been a difficult one for reviewers to get their heads round. It has been interesting to see it described by some critics as if it were another exploration of Essex (the 'new English landscape', according to Ken Worpole's recent book). Here is Luke Turner, writing for The Quietus... 'The estuarine landscape of Field Of Reeds is best seen in two
ways: in grand panorama from an aircraft banking over London, when sun
glints off the water of the Thames widening toward the North Sea. Or, on
the other hand, oozy intimacy along the rough shoreline, traditionally a
site for dumping the waste of London. Here, alongside creeks where air
bubbles rattle from the mud with the ebbing tide, a rutted horizon
offers up gifts of ancient marmalade pots, broken clay pipes, fused and
rusted metal. It's a landscape that refuses, like memory or dreams, to
be defined or contained, that forever shifts and opens itself up to new
narratives and fresh explorations.'

With both musicians and reviewers taking inspiration from the new nature writers and psychogeographers, it was no real surprise earlier this year to come across a project directly influenced by W. G. Sebald. I can't now recall the exact circumstances in which I initially read The Rings of Saturn back in 1995, but it would have been in my first flat, at the
top of a house in Tufnell Park. I imagine my concentration was occasionally broken by the sound of baselines throbbing from the flat below, owned by record producer Dilip Harris. Now, all these years later, I see that he and Rob Gallagher of Galliano have assumed the joint identity William Adamson and recorded Under An East Coast Moon, an album that draws 'inspiration from the Suffolk landscape – ancient burial grounds,
fortifications against Nazi invaders, sea defences now inadequate
against global warming and forests felled by the great storm of 1987.' Its 'cautionary tales of
fallen women, folk songs and gothic legends fuse with reflections and
refractions from W. G. Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn.'

Well that'll probably do for now, but feel free to comment below on the interesting landscape related music I have neglected to mentioned. I'll end this post with the trailer for The Epic of Everest, scored by Simon Fisher Turner.

Wednesday, December 04, 2013

Last week I visited the Architectural Association Gallery in London, where there is an exhibition devoted to the British Exploratory Land Archive, a collaboration between architects Mark Smout & Laura Allen (Smout Allen) and Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG. You probably all know BLDGBLOG, but in case not, my earlier post 'Landscape Futures' included a few of its ideas, taken from The BLDGBLOG Book. One of these, I now see, was that Rachel Whiteread should begin filling whole cave systems with plaster to create monumental sculptures. This exhibition gives an idea of what that might look like, in the shape of a 3D-printed rendering of the Nottingham Cave systems. These tunnels in the 'frozen Sahara' beneath the city were explored in a long BLDGBLOG post last year. The exhibit's white plastic gives their warm desert sandstone the appearance of ice. The model reveals a hidden structure to the caves which, I imagine, would be difficult to describe even by someone familiar with their twisting underground passages.

BELA call this work 'a Speleological Pantograph for the aboveground reproduction of subterranean
spaces, objects and volumes. Although functioning very much like a traditional
pantograph, this device will instead act three-dimensionally, connected to
tools of volumetric analysis installed in underground spaces, such as caves, mines
and basements, in order to reproduce those spaces on the Earth's surface.' Imagining the reality of Nottingham's old sand mines from a pale plastic facsimile might seem as futile as trying to envisage a living snake on the basis of its discarded skin. But the pantograph, in rescaling an object, always alters it (imagine how Rachel Whiteread's sculptures would fail if they were reduced in size). The Tate, incidentally, have an etching, Head, by Eduardo Paolozzi in which he used a pantograph 'assembled wrongly to distort his original drawing by
curving and elongating it.' Presumably it would be possible to reprogram the Speleological Pantograph in order to create an uncanny transformation of some well-known underground space.

This photograph shows another speculative envirographic instrument being tested in the slate spoil heaps of North Wales. It is a 'Clinometer', which 'combines 2D and
3D graphic mapping languages into a faceted 3D form composed of nine triangular
aluminium sheets, upon which hanging weights are fixed. The device can be
assembled in numerous configurations, using a bungee cord laced across the face
of the sheets through eyelets along their edges and lever arms attached to the
weights.' How would this actually work, I wondered, looking at the stack of metal triangles on the floor of the gallery. This might simply reveal my ignorance of survey techniques, or it may be entirely missing the point, like asking how Tarkovsky's Stalker navigates the Zone by throwing bolts. Looking at the photograph above, the Clinometer seems to operate through some metonymic principle, unfolding itself to resemble a fragment of the landscape. And you can imagine its aluminium surfaces reflecting the surrounding spoil heaps, like the zig-zag mirror piece Robert Smithson made in 1969 at an abandoned open-cast mine further south at Tredegar.

The exhibition includes photographs of other instruments in situ. A Capture Blanket for soil-remediation on the side of Parys Mountain resembles the spent parachute of a planetary probe. A Sniffer for aerosol sampling in a field of corn gave me the idea for an anti-hayfever device (yes, I write as a sufferer...) However, BELA are also thinking about installing instruments on a larger scale where they 'become indistinguishable from landscapes'. The Flywheel
Reservoir (below), designed for Isle of Sheppey in the Thames Estuary, would be
'a constellation of architectural features, geological augmentations and topographic
ornaments that 'harvests' and smooths the fluctuating electrical supply' generated by the
London Array, the world's largest offshore wind farm. The model resembles Walter De Maria's Lightning Field. 'Power
levels and flywheel capacity is displayed in an elevated point cloud of laser
light that ebbs and flows in the air like a mist over the landscape.'

It was mist over the Isle of Sheppey that reduced visibility and caused a 130 vehicle pile up recently on its new road bridge (sixty people were injured but none killed). Thinking of this makes me wonder how safe a vast landscape battery under the island would be. BELA worked on the design with Williams Hybrid Power whose flywheel technology was developed for Williams Formula 1 cars. The island in their architectural model resembles a circuit board and beneath the table (under the bonnet, as it were) wires dangle, waiting to be connected. What kind of subterranean architecture would be needed to keep the 'garden of flywheels' going? Perhaps like the old slate and sand mines this site too would eventually be abandoned, left for exploration by future architects and then taken as inspiration for a new cycle of landscape speculations.

About this site

This blog explores landscape through the arts: painting, installation, photography, literature, music, film... I've also on occasion covered the creation or alteration of landscapes by architects, artists and garden designers. For the first year I did several short entries each week; since then I have reduced the frequency and some posts are a bit longer. In naming this site 'Some Landscapes' initially I just saw it as a few modest notes and didn't know if I'd keep it up. Of course it will always only cover 'some' landscapes, even though I occasionally like to think of it as an expanding cultural gazetteer. There is a pretty long index (see above) listing the artists of all kinds that have been mentioned here. There are also maps and a chronology of posts. I started writing this blog using the name 'Plinius' (a little tribute to the younger and older Plinys) and am now rather attached to it as a 'nom de blog'. Comments are very welcome but are moderated to prevent spam. Plinus / Andrew Ray.